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Spelunky 2

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Steam page



Spelunky returns in this greatly-expanded sequel to the original roguelike platformer! Meet the next generation of explorers as they find themselves on the Moon, searching for treasure and missing family. Spelunky 2 builds upon the unique, randomized challenges that made the original a classic, offering a huge adventure designed to satisfy players old and new. Explore the game alone, play locally with up to four players, or, for the first time, join up with friends online to unravel its mysteries together (or battle it out in competitive Arena modes).

A Bigger and More Dynamic World, with So Much to See and Do
Spelunky 2's world is even denser than the one in the original game, offering many more areas, characters, traps, and items, as well as new ways to interact with them (and for them to interact with each other). The world has expanded in other ways, too, with branching paths and multi-layered levels adding a third dimension to the classic 2d platforming. Animals can also be tamed and ridden. And dynamic liquid physics create new challenges and make the world feel extra reactive and alive.

Build a Community, Make Friends
Back in Base Camp, characters you unlock will mill about and relax between runs, offering encouragement and advice. As you explore, your camp will expand and develop into a thriving little community to welcome you whenever you need a break from exploring. While there, you can also access shortcuts and practice your moves in safety.

The Game is Yours to Explore
Spelunky 2 is not just about "getting good and beating the game" - more than that, it's an endlessly replayable playground to experiment in and find your own way, creating stories against the backdrop of an expansive, deeply-interactive world filled with secrets. The more you play, the more the game becomes yours!

spel2_about2.jpg


Key Features, Summarized:
  • A Bigger World with all new areas, monsters, traps, and items!
  • An Extra Dimension is added by allowing players to access a second layer behind the normal playfield. The second layer might contain treasure rooms, hidden passages, and other special places.
  • Multiple Routes Through the Game will add variety and give players more ways to personalize a run.
  • Find and Ride Mounts (like turkeys!) that have special abilities. Enemies may ride mounts, as well!
  • New NPCs that you can help, hurt, or ignore… to make each run feel even more like a unique story.
  • Variations and Changes to Classic Spelunky Concepts like shops and ghosts that will make veteran players rethink their strategies.
  • Improved Liquid Physics allow water and lava to move and pour realistically, which drastically affects the playfield (and looks cool)
  • Deadly Poison and Curses can be inflicted on players and enemies alike.
  • Build a Permanent Home at Base Camp as you do runs and explore the caves.
  • Improved Lighting and Special Effects are paired with richer visual and audio design.
  • Deeper Mysteries that may require a community effort to unravel.
  • Possibly More Eggplants

He says they are trying to get the game out on Steam "no later than a few weeks after our September 15th PS4 launch date."

 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Joined
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
FINALLY they release additional info... and I think it'll be worth a look. It's been a pretty dry year for me gaming-wise, so hopefully this fixes that.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
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27,089
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
I'm only gonna spoil one aspect of this game: One of the options for 'Damsel in Distress' is a cat.

The most adorable cat you've ever seen.

Or heard.

And livestreamers are sacrificing it to Kali for shits and giggles.

:timetoburn:
 
Joined
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Illinois
I kind of care, although after watching a decent bit of it I'm not really sure what makes it Spelunky 2. I'm sure as shit not skilled at Spelunky but the differences look relatively minor. Which probably means it's good for people who poopsocked it originally but since I'm a dirty casual I'm left scratching my head. Although damsels are all pets now, rather than optionally being pets. Showing that the true enemy is, as always, w*men.
 

Belegarsson

Think about hairy dwarfs all the time ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Oct 20, 2015
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Uwotopia
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
On the bright side it looks like the game supports remote play together. Fiddled with it a while ago while helping my colleague play Moving Out with his girlfriend, basically the thing emulates LAN through streaming like parsec, works pretty well.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
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Messages
27,089
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
A quick look tells me that it's basically more of the same, with ramped-up difficulty.

Spelunky 2-caves are now as hard as Spelunky 1-jungle, Spelunky 2-jungle is now as hard as Spelunky 1-ice caves, etc. Spelunky then has seven worlds plus lots of hidden sidestuff, so plenty to see and die over.

One decision I don't like is how Yu is tackling the woke-crowd. In the original Spelunky there was a damsel to rescue which functioned as a health pack. Immediately the feminazis and SJW-brigade started complaining, and Yu's solution to that was brilliant: Instead of changing the damsel, he added more options for the damsel so it could be a hunk, a pug and in some rare cases a sloth!

Only the pug made it into Spelunky 2. In addition there's also a cat and a hamster now. No human health packs, because that will offend someone and hurt their feelings!

In dealing with the woke-brigade complaining about content in your game, there are only two options that work: Either put enough choices into the game that the basis for the complaint is undermined and the evil agenda of the complainer is exposed, or ignore them completely. Removing choices to placate them is not an option, because then the woke-brigade has defeated you and has power over you. They will always be on your back. Refer to Kipling's poem "Dane-geld" for further information.
 

Black

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2007
Messages
1,872,592
If you beat this game's version of Yama, so doing things the hard way, you unlock the og Spelunky dude from the free version
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/spelunky-2-review/

SPELUNKY 2 REVIEW
A brilliant action roguelike that's only as complex as you want it to be.

You can kill cavemen in their sleep in Spelunky 2. That’s the kind of game it is: ultra-violent. At the time of writing I've died nearly 400 times, which is not very many times to die in a Spelunky game. I’m just getting started. Everything can be going right in Spelunky 2—you can be carefully setting off arrow traps, you can have a shotgun, you can have plenty of bombs and ropes—and then a deluge of very unfortunate shit will annihilate you quicker than you can say “eggplant run”.

Released in 2013, the original Spelunky was a 2D roguelike phenomenon (and PC Gamer Game of the Year) spawned from a freeware pixel art gem. Spelunky 2 is better and more: there are more worlds, more secrets, interlocking paths, you can ride axolotls and “rock dogs,” and the causes of death have at least tripled. It’s a roguelike platformer loaded with lethal interlocking threats, with a whimsical veneer you should not let fool you.

This is the kind of sequel that risks making its predecessor redundant. Certain worlds return from the original in a slightly changed form, such as the jungles, the ice caverns, and the caves (now called 'Dwelling'). An angered shopkeeper is still a pain in the ass, albeit slightly easier to rob, and he now has competitors vying for your gold: There’s a walrus with a dice game and bodyguard, there’s Tun with her challenge rooms, and cavemen have evolved enough that they’ll now try to sell you useless crap like skulls, God love 'em. There are more NPCs and more side quests, such as the guy in Dwelling who wants you to rescue turkeys (and will kill you if you try to rob them), and Van Horsing in Volcania who gives you money for some reason, no questions asked.

And for a while you'll probably vigilantly ignore all these distractions, focusing instead on unlocking shortcuts, before realising it's best to ignore the shortcuts on your path to finishing the game. This critical path starts in Dwelling and culminates in a mini-boss before branching off into two possible second worlds. The game is front loaded with overly familiar areas, but it reserves its most resplendent and surprising locations for players who have the patience to surmount those initial challenges.

Spelunky 2.0
It's fair to be concerned that Spelunky 2 is a bloated version of a near perfect formula. All the features heavily marketed pre-launch, like layered worlds and branching paths, aren't nearly as complicated as they could have been. No one's going to get lost in Spelunky 2. Some of the levels are much larger than before, but the general Spelunky rule still (mostly) applies: Go downward and find the exit. Mini-bosses are the kind that will be manageable with one's eyes closed after a couple of attempts, and, at first, mostly serve as mechanisms to select which world to visit next.

Still, only the dedicated are going to finish this game. The new opening world is preparation for this truth: It’s harder than the two following areas, adding some truly nasty bastards like the burrowing cave mole and barrel-rolling horned lizard. The fact that Spelunky 2 will be incompletable for all but the most determined and patient is utterly beside the point though, because Spelunky 2 is another comedic, beautifully physical anecdote generator. After nearly 40 hours of play I'm still discovering new world states, just as I'm still falling afoul of those damned purple bats.

Other modern action roguelikes are similarly joyous on a base level: take Flinthook, or Enter the Gungeon. But neither they (nor any others) really begin to rival Spelunky 2 when it comes to the sheer scale of the thing. It’s true that you can play a dozen consecutive runs without encountering anything of particular note, but then you’ll enter the Jungle and there will be goddamned vampires in it. Or Volcania will have a weird industrial production line. Or you'll find a rideable fish that can teleport you (usually into a wall). Or you'll accidentally let a boss crush through another layer of its lair, unearthing a whole new world.

What most excites me about Spelunky 2 is all the stuff other challenge runners and secret finders are going to do. This new world is as riddled with telltale signs of undiscovered secrets as it is by amusing new ways to die. It’s lousy with reasons to diverge from the critical path, and forsaking a promising run in order to experiment with a possible secret is usually too tempting to deny. What’s that giant drill in Volcania? Why’s this guy giving me gold for free? How do I access the City of Gold? At the time of writing, no streamer has accessed all of this game’s worlds yet, but they’ve found plenty of weirdness.

Spelunky 2 feels busier than the original. There's a lot going on at once. The graphics are chunkier and the controls a tad more sensitive. Enemy hitboxes seem especially fine tuned—you're going to want to jump right on top of a snake's head, not close enough. As with the original, using a controller is highly recommended, and while there's no online cooperative play at launch (it had some teething problems on PS4) it'll support crossplay with console players when it does.

It's hard to make a call on whether Spelunky 2 is better than Spelunky. Spelunky was already the best. This sequel provides a clean slate for secret hunters and speedrunners, and it's a game designed as much to be spectated as it is to be played. It's less a sequel and more a 2.0: a place for newcomers to start that’s also swollen with mysteries and feats for veterans to tackle. A part of me wonders what its creators could have done instead of make this sequel, which is effectively an iteration. But I’m not going to argue with more Spelunky: a truly ultra-violent game you can play with your kids, ridden with fathomless secrets, magical gif moments and killable sleeping cavemen.

THE VERDICT
87

SPELUNKY 2
Spelunky 2 doesn't advance the original's formula, but there's more stuff to sink your teeth into.
 

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